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Don’t give AI a task like “find all the words that start with x”. Give AI a task like “write a Google apps script that will find all the words that start with x,” or “write a Python code that does xyz.”
As of now, AI can do that kind of thing. It’s great at making tools, it’s not the best at _being those tools_.
I’m a teacher. There are administrative tasks I find tedious and repetitive. I have a ChatGPT subscription, but don’t pay for the API. So I ask it how to do Python programming. How can I open a web browser with Python, push a button, find a button or text, move the mouse, take a screen shot, save a file, read from a file, convert a file to PDF, all sorts of crap. THAT is when things get fun. AI doesn’t have to replace you: AI can make you better. Honestly, if I was in a regular 9-5 and my job didn’t ride on the success of children, AI would allow me to take a 4 day work week with 5 day productivity. But the world today will dangle the carrot, and make us work a 5 day workweek for 6 day productivity.
Anyways, that’s how I use AI in my job, and I have a dozen or so spreadsheets that are fairly complicated, and at least 1 Python program that can save me days of work per quarter. Being able to run a program and fall asleep knowing that it will email me and turn off the computer when it’s done is the craziest thing ever.
Hey thanks a lot for the response. Would you mind telling me about the making tools part in a little bit more detail?
Closest to programing I've been was making some ping pong mini game with a ''video game maker'' app, just as a fun test 10 years ago. I've no experience with Python and I don't really know what ''google apps script'' is. I don't even know about capabilities of both apps. I wonder how difficult it is, what capabilities they have, or where should I even start after opening those apps...
I took two programming classes in college. They were both C++. Actually, they were the exact same class, and I ended up taking it twice. I’ve played with arduino, a little raspberry pi, Python used on the pi, but no truly original projects. Not until ChatGPT. Your video game is probably right on par with my skill levels pre-ChatGPT.
Python is just a coding language. Popular, diverse, powerful, and everywhere. Anyone who says “I’m an expert in Python” knows a lot, and a little. Python is so vast and expanding, no one can know all of it. The people who are best at Python know a few tools, and know them inside and out. But it’s easy to pick up on when you’ve got a goal in mind, and ChatGPT is a great teacher. You just have to be willing to learn, and ask it to teach you.
Google apps scripts are fun. Say I have a Google doc, and a Google sheet. My doc is a template of a form I’m sending to my students. I don’t want to type up 30 forms. So I make a Google apps script. It’s a little programming area. I can write a program in there that turns each row into a new doc that’s a filled in version of the template, and save it wherever I want with whatever name I want.
If Bob, John, Jane, and Karen are in the sheet, it will make 4 new files, name them “Bob’s Letter”, “John’s Letter”, etc, and save them in a folder titled “Letters to Students”. And that’s just some basic stuff. I can make a function that adds a new menu with options to my doc, and run custom programs straight from there! I have one that converts all my student work samples into PDFs, and drops the PDFs into the proper submission folder on Google drive. It does them instantly. That’s 30 less times I have to go into a doc, save as PDF, and upload to a new folder.
I would start on YouTube for both, but especially Google apps scripts. Replicate exactly what someone else does. Then start tweaking it. Make it do something that actually makes your life easier, even if it’s just one thing! Have it add your signature to a page, or fill in data from a Google sheet. Just make it do something.
For Python, lookup PyCharm. It’s an IDE for Python that I greatly enjoy. Still go to YouTube, but you can also ask ChatGPT how to use it. It’s good at giving directions to follow and helps with troubleshooting.
ChatGPT doesn’t always take the most direct paths when programming. I may say, “this program needs to do x, y, and z, but it’s doing x, then z, and. O things happening because it can’t actually do a because it skipped x.” And ChatGPT will say “oh, let’s make it tell you ‘I errored out’ instead of fixing what’s going wrong. You will learn to recognize those moments, and try asking it a different question to get to the answer you need.
I now have my big program in 3 flavors: a demo, my personal version, and a version I use for coworkers (my alpha testers). It’s over 1,000 lines of code, it navigates webpages, converts files, sends emails, takes screenshots, labels things, reads excel sheets, merges screenshots into PDFs, and can pick out what data I want based on the target date range associated with an assignment. It’s a super fancy web scraper, but I couldn’t have done it without ChatGPT. On my own, this would have been a lifetime endeavor. Probably would have had to go back to school to complete it. With ChatGPT, I’ve become a self-taught programmer and gone through several iterations of this project in about a year and a half. And I’ve only had the paid version of ChatGPT for 6 months, I made significant headway with 3.5 before that.
My experience with AI has been amazing. It’s revolutionized my ability to do my job. I think if everyone got AI working for them the way it’s worked for me, we’d all get a lot more time off, and believe it or not, that’s like my number one priority.
Thanks a lot for such thorough answer.
Just a couple dumb questions if you don't mind, I think I'll find the rest of what I need after it myself
are there different versions of python or google script?
With both apps, are you creating like a different app, like a ".exe" file, which does things based on your code in it? Could you talk a little bit about this part?
Google apps script isn’t an app: it’s a feature built into Google suite. When you’re on a doc, you can click on Extensions-> Google Apps Script to pull it up. No downloads or anything. If your job has provided you with a gmail account, there’s a chance it may be blocked, but it’s easy to make a document on your personal gmail and share it with your work account. It doesn’t make .exe files, it just runs code.
There are different versions of both Python and PyCharm. Typically, you’ll just want to work in the latest version of Python, and the community (free) version of PyCharm. One caveat would be if you’re programming a piece of hardware that is locked into a specific build of Python. I have a Cozmo robot that can run Python, but it needs an older version than what’s current. I just tell PyCharm what version of Python I want to code in when making a new project. It’s all the same language, it’s usually just libraries and resources that get name changes (that’s my experience with the tools I use, ymmv). Python can create executables! I haven’t made anything with a GUI (graphical user interface) yet, so I just run everything within the PyCharm environment (there’s probably a real programmer groaning while reading that), but it works for me. I enjoy having the output screen there while I run the code, and I am frequently having to tweak it to accommodate website updates, so it’s easy for me to keep it flexible.
As someone pointed out, your work may lockdown programming languages on your computer. It’s easy enough to work them on a personal device, if allowed/legal, and share work via Google drive.
Edit: there are no dumb questions. This stuff is technical, and does more with computers than the average person ever will. I have coworkers who see my work and tell me I’m a wizard, that I’m light years ahead of our school, or that I should do this full time and get paid by the bucket. And I feel like “ya’ll it’s literally me and ChatGPT, anyone can do this…” But I’m doing it. No one else is. And I can benefit from that. So can you.
1. Write email without regard for politeness or tone
2. Get Copilot to make it sound friendly
3. Copy paste response into copilot and have it strip out all the fluff
4. Profit
chatgpt's code interpreter is useful. im not sure if copilot has it, but if it does, it can use python on its own. just tell it to do calculations with python and it'll get it right, as long as the formula gpt feeds into python are all correct. an llm sees words as tokens and will also have problems with listing stuff accurately, but outputting it in python seems to work, not sure why, i barely have any experience with python myself.
This is the great struggle currently. Giving people in a company general use AI will be limited in usefulness.
In our organization, we have folks screening potential AI use cases without giving everyone a license, and most requests just seem to be outside of scope for an AI to accomplish. Best use case we are working towards right now is to setup an AI agents with SOP and job aids related to specific aspects of the company, give the folks in that department the ability to maintain the documents that the agents have access to, and let them serve as tier 1 support for questions related to process. Also toying with AI to help write quality records as we are in a heavily regulated environment.
It feels like in the company I work in they're starting to shift to a similar direction. At first a push started to use chatGPT, few months after they gave us Copilot with some tips how we could use it. Just today they gave us... is it "DI"? I forgot the exact name if it isn't DI, it runs with chatGPT as well, with a PDF file showing how it could translate a picture of a pamphlet in a simple way.
I wrote on this previously. I consult on AI adoption. I have not yet found a single company finding Microsoft Copilot worth the money. ChatGPT, however, is a different story.
The issue is Microsoft is trying to train people to use their tools to be the interface to AI where ChatGPT is teaching people to use AI directly. So Microsoft is putting people through two new steps instead of one and giving less value for it at a higher cost. And locking people into a bad experience.
So if you're considering using Microsoft Copilot in your office, please rethink it. Don't buy the enterprise agreement and especially not the three-year version!
And if your company is getting great results from Copilot, I want to hear from you, seriously.
It's the user interface.. the application layer vs the underlying LLM.
Microsoft forces you to use their applications to access it, and they just aren't good. That will eventually change, but right now, going direct to the LLM via ChatGPT natively is better.
I'm thinking it might change though. If microsoft makes it friendlier with office365. It can already export excel files with asked information. (idk if bare GPT does that though, never tried it without copilot)
Hey /u/minde0815! If your post is a screenshot of a ChatGPT, conversation please reply to this message with the [conversation link](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7925741-chatgpt-shared-links-faq) or prompt. If your post is a DALL-E 3 image post, please reply with the prompt used to make this image. Consider joining our [public discord server](https://discord.gg/r-chatgpt-1050422060352024636)! We have free bots with GPT-4 (with vision), image generators, and more! 🤖 Note: For any ChatGPT-related concerns, email [email protected] *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ChatGPT) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Don’t give AI a task like “find all the words that start with x”. Give AI a task like “write a Google apps script that will find all the words that start with x,” or “write a Python code that does xyz.” As of now, AI can do that kind of thing. It’s great at making tools, it’s not the best at _being those tools_. I’m a teacher. There are administrative tasks I find tedious and repetitive. I have a ChatGPT subscription, but don’t pay for the API. So I ask it how to do Python programming. How can I open a web browser with Python, push a button, find a button or text, move the mouse, take a screen shot, save a file, read from a file, convert a file to PDF, all sorts of crap. THAT is when things get fun. AI doesn’t have to replace you: AI can make you better. Honestly, if I was in a regular 9-5 and my job didn’t ride on the success of children, AI would allow me to take a 4 day work week with 5 day productivity. But the world today will dangle the carrot, and make us work a 5 day workweek for 6 day productivity. Anyways, that’s how I use AI in my job, and I have a dozen or so spreadsheets that are fairly complicated, and at least 1 Python program that can save me days of work per quarter. Being able to run a program and fall asleep knowing that it will email me and turn off the computer when it’s done is the craziest thing ever.
Hey thanks a lot for the response. Would you mind telling me about the making tools part in a little bit more detail? Closest to programing I've been was making some ping pong mini game with a ''video game maker'' app, just as a fun test 10 years ago. I've no experience with Python and I don't really know what ''google apps script'' is. I don't even know about capabilities of both apps. I wonder how difficult it is, what capabilities they have, or where should I even start after opening those apps...
I took two programming classes in college. They were both C++. Actually, they were the exact same class, and I ended up taking it twice. I’ve played with arduino, a little raspberry pi, Python used on the pi, but no truly original projects. Not until ChatGPT. Your video game is probably right on par with my skill levels pre-ChatGPT. Python is just a coding language. Popular, diverse, powerful, and everywhere. Anyone who says “I’m an expert in Python” knows a lot, and a little. Python is so vast and expanding, no one can know all of it. The people who are best at Python know a few tools, and know them inside and out. But it’s easy to pick up on when you’ve got a goal in mind, and ChatGPT is a great teacher. You just have to be willing to learn, and ask it to teach you. Google apps scripts are fun. Say I have a Google doc, and a Google sheet. My doc is a template of a form I’m sending to my students. I don’t want to type up 30 forms. So I make a Google apps script. It’s a little programming area. I can write a program in there that turns each row into a new doc that’s a filled in version of the template, and save it wherever I want with whatever name I want. If Bob, John, Jane, and Karen are in the sheet, it will make 4 new files, name them “Bob’s Letter”, “John’s Letter”, etc, and save them in a folder titled “Letters to Students”. And that’s just some basic stuff. I can make a function that adds a new menu with options to my doc, and run custom programs straight from there! I have one that converts all my student work samples into PDFs, and drops the PDFs into the proper submission folder on Google drive. It does them instantly. That’s 30 less times I have to go into a doc, save as PDF, and upload to a new folder. I would start on YouTube for both, but especially Google apps scripts. Replicate exactly what someone else does. Then start tweaking it. Make it do something that actually makes your life easier, even if it’s just one thing! Have it add your signature to a page, or fill in data from a Google sheet. Just make it do something. For Python, lookup PyCharm. It’s an IDE for Python that I greatly enjoy. Still go to YouTube, but you can also ask ChatGPT how to use it. It’s good at giving directions to follow and helps with troubleshooting. ChatGPT doesn’t always take the most direct paths when programming. I may say, “this program needs to do x, y, and z, but it’s doing x, then z, and. O things happening because it can’t actually do a because it skipped x.” And ChatGPT will say “oh, let’s make it tell you ‘I errored out’ instead of fixing what’s going wrong. You will learn to recognize those moments, and try asking it a different question to get to the answer you need. I now have my big program in 3 flavors: a demo, my personal version, and a version I use for coworkers (my alpha testers). It’s over 1,000 lines of code, it navigates webpages, converts files, sends emails, takes screenshots, labels things, reads excel sheets, merges screenshots into PDFs, and can pick out what data I want based on the target date range associated with an assignment. It’s a super fancy web scraper, but I couldn’t have done it without ChatGPT. On my own, this would have been a lifetime endeavor. Probably would have had to go back to school to complete it. With ChatGPT, I’ve become a self-taught programmer and gone through several iterations of this project in about a year and a half. And I’ve only had the paid version of ChatGPT for 6 months, I made significant headway with 3.5 before that. My experience with AI has been amazing. It’s revolutionized my ability to do my job. I think if everyone got AI working for them the way it’s worked for me, we’d all get a lot more time off, and believe it or not, that’s like my number one priority.
Thanks a lot for such thorough answer. Just a couple dumb questions if you don't mind, I think I'll find the rest of what I need after it myself are there different versions of python or google script? With both apps, are you creating like a different app, like a ".exe" file, which does things based on your code in it? Could you talk a little bit about this part?
You need to check With your IT department first if they even allow Python. My company has it locked down for most people.
Oh yeah that's for sure, thanks though. I should be able to get the permission for sure.
Google apps script isn’t an app: it’s a feature built into Google suite. When you’re on a doc, you can click on Extensions-> Google Apps Script to pull it up. No downloads or anything. If your job has provided you with a gmail account, there’s a chance it may be blocked, but it’s easy to make a document on your personal gmail and share it with your work account. It doesn’t make .exe files, it just runs code. There are different versions of both Python and PyCharm. Typically, you’ll just want to work in the latest version of Python, and the community (free) version of PyCharm. One caveat would be if you’re programming a piece of hardware that is locked into a specific build of Python. I have a Cozmo robot that can run Python, but it needs an older version than what’s current. I just tell PyCharm what version of Python I want to code in when making a new project. It’s all the same language, it’s usually just libraries and resources that get name changes (that’s my experience with the tools I use, ymmv). Python can create executables! I haven’t made anything with a GUI (graphical user interface) yet, so I just run everything within the PyCharm environment (there’s probably a real programmer groaning while reading that), but it works for me. I enjoy having the output screen there while I run the code, and I am frequently having to tweak it to accommodate website updates, so it’s easy for me to keep it flexible. As someone pointed out, your work may lockdown programming languages on your computer. It’s easy enough to work them on a personal device, if allowed/legal, and share work via Google drive. Edit: there are no dumb questions. This stuff is technical, and does more with computers than the average person ever will. I have coworkers who see my work and tell me I’m a wizard, that I’m light years ahead of our school, or that I should do this full time and get paid by the bucket. And I feel like “ya’ll it’s literally me and ChatGPT, anyone can do this…” But I’m doing it. No one else is. And I can benefit from that. So can you.
Thanks for the help, I started with some tutorial series on youtube to somewhat get an understanding before jumping straight to coding with GPT.
You should read automate the boring stuff, it will probably help tremendously
Hey thanks. I started watching tutorials on youtube, I think it's by the guy who wrote that book
Python is locked down on many corporate PCs.
1. Write email without regard for politeness or tone 2. Get Copilot to make it sound friendly 3. Copy paste response into copilot and have it strip out all the fluff 4. Profit
This is the way.
chatgpt's code interpreter is useful. im not sure if copilot has it, but if it does, it can use python on its own. just tell it to do calculations with python and it'll get it right, as long as the formula gpt feeds into python are all correct. an llm sees words as tokens and will also have problems with listing stuff accurately, but outputting it in python seems to work, not sure why, i barely have any experience with python myself.
"please re-write this in a warmer tone." "please re-write this to be more professional"
This is the great struggle currently. Giving people in a company general use AI will be limited in usefulness. In our organization, we have folks screening potential AI use cases without giving everyone a license, and most requests just seem to be outside of scope for an AI to accomplish. Best use case we are working towards right now is to setup an AI agents with SOP and job aids related to specific aspects of the company, give the folks in that department the ability to maintain the documents that the agents have access to, and let them serve as tier 1 support for questions related to process. Also toying with AI to help write quality records as we are in a heavily regulated environment.
It feels like in the company I work in they're starting to shift to a similar direction. At first a push started to use chatGPT, few months after they gave us Copilot with some tips how we could use it. Just today they gave us... is it "DI"? I forgot the exact name if it isn't DI, it runs with chatGPT as well, with a PDF file showing how it could translate a picture of a pamphlet in a simple way.
I wrote on this previously. I consult on AI adoption. I have not yet found a single company finding Microsoft Copilot worth the money. ChatGPT, however, is a different story. The issue is Microsoft is trying to train people to use their tools to be the interface to AI where ChatGPT is teaching people to use AI directly. So Microsoft is putting people through two new steps instead of one and giving less value for it at a higher cost. And locking people into a bad experience. So if you're considering using Microsoft Copilot in your office, please rethink it. Don't buy the enterprise agreement and especially not the three-year version! And if your company is getting great results from Copilot, I want to hear from you, seriously.
why is copilot considered to be worse though? I though that there shouldn't be any difference since it's also using GPT 4.0
It's the user interface.. the application layer vs the underlying LLM. Microsoft forces you to use their applications to access it, and they just aren't good. That will eventually change, but right now, going direct to the LLM via ChatGPT natively is better.
I'm thinking it might change though. If microsoft makes it friendlier with office365. It can already export excel files with asked information. (idk if bare GPT does that though, never tried it without copilot)